


The Persistence of Memory

by prairiecrow



Series: Terra Incognita [11]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Knight Rider (1982), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Episode: Junk Yard Dog, Established Relationship, Flashbacks, M/M, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Running Away
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-16
Updated: 2013-09-17
Packaged: 2017-12-26 19:47:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/969602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>KITT and water... not a good combination, as Tony is about to discover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Since this fic references the Knight Rider episode "Junk Yard Dog" heavily, let me know if any of you haven't seen it (or want to see it again) and I can arrange a Livestream event to show it. :)

Something was wrong, off, out of synch: Tony had first become aware of it when JARVIS reported that KITT-as-Obsidian wasn't following him after Iron Man had dived into the ocean in pursuit of a rapidly retreating GORSA submarine, and it had taken a sharp query — "You coming, sweetheart?" — and a good two more seconds of hesitation before KITT had taken the plunge himself. The A.I. had performed flawlessly thereafter, adjusting to the conditions of a thicker medium than air with a rapidity that had made Tony's heart swell with pride even in the midst of a combat situation… but he'd been uncharacteristically curt in his responses during the battle, and afterwards, when they rendezvoused with the other Avengers, he'd maintained a silence that was as disquieting as the slight stiffness in his posture that Tony was dead sure nobody else knew KITT well enough to notice. 

He hadn't asked at the time. If KITT didn't want to talk in front of the other members of the team, hey, Tony could respect that — he wasn't exactly a Chatty Cathy himself when it came to Steve Rogers' All-American Dog and Pony Show — but the lack of communication in Tony's own headset was more disquieting yet. Nor had KITT offered any clues, not a single word in fact, on the way back to New York City, and still Tony didn't ask, because he might only have been with KITT for about half a year but he'd already learned that if KITT had something to say, he wouldn't hesitate to come right out with it — and if he didn't want to talk for whatever reason, it was pointless to try and force the issue. 

Instead Tony had kept up a steady flow of his own banter, commentary on the combat just past and jokes at Steve's expense and some discussion with JARVIS concerning ways to improve the underwater transfer rate of the suit's repulsors… and still KITT remained incommunicado, a silent graceful shape cutting through the wide blue yonder at Tony's side like a silhouette cut out of interstellar blackness, and just about as cold and remote. All traces of sea water had been wind-blasted off them both long before they reached Stark Tower, but when they'd touched down in Tony's lab KITT finally spoke, interrupting Tony's earnest musings on power-to-flow medium ratios to address JARVIS as he strode rapidly toward Obsidian's reload bay: 

" _I need it_ ** _off_** _, JARVIS — all of it, every last particle. Understood?_ " 

" _If you're referring to the salt water and associated contaminants,_ " JARVIS responded, sounding as surprised as he ever had — which was to say, only mildly, " _of course. As you know, my sterilization protocols are —_ " 

" _Good,_ " KITT said as if that ended the conversation, and he still hadn't so much as glanced at Tony, in fact as he turned smartly around to step backwards into the reload bay his scanner was already fading to black, and a cold frisson of near-dread ran up Tony's spine to stiffen every hair on the back of his neck, prompting a pang of panicked dismay: 

 _Oh fuck, what did I_ ** _do?_**  

"Kitten?" He approached Obsidian carefully, cuing the unfolding of his own armour with a tiny flick of his gaze that JARVIS correctly interpreted instantly. "Listen, if I did something —" 

" _KITT is no longer inhabiting the Obsidian android,_ " JARVIS announced. 

From bad to worse: KITT always announced his shifts of vessel, if the nature of the change wasn't self-evident. But when Tony's gaze shifted to the Silver android in its own coffin-like bay, the human simulacrum remained beautiful but devoid of enlivening intelligence. "Okay, so where is he then?" 

" _He has transferred himself to the Knight Two Thousand automobile,_ " JARVIS confirmed, " _and is attempting to leave the parking garage._ " 

"Let him go." Which was a no-brainer: if KITT was angry to begin with, telling the A.I. that he wasn't allowed to go for a drive would only fan his rage to new heights. "Jesus, what the hell — did he tell you _anything?_ " 

" _Negative, sir._ " A pause, no doubt as JARVIS attempted to query. Tony winced, but it was already too late to intervene. " _He has closed all the ports between us that he is aware of. Shall I call up his live process flow statistics?_ " 

"Do it." Tony scanned the four holographic windows that popped up in front of him, almost desperate for any clue that could explain why the creature who adored him with more devotion than was humanly possible had suddenly decided to cut him dead. The jagged readouts told a clear tale: something had hit KITT like a truck, cognitively speaking. "When the hell did _this_ start?" 

" _At 14:23:57,_ " JARVIS stated, " _shortly before he entered the Atlantic Ocean._ " 

"Call that up," Tony ordered, and one look at the memory interface archive stats made it clear: those five seconds before Obsidian had followed Iron Man underwater in pursuit of the submarine were the root of the problem. When Tony tried to call up the associated memory traces from KITT's backups, though, all he got was a profoundly unsatisfying wall of static. 

"Encoded?" 

" _Indeed. Evidently he did not want this memory block to be accessed._ " 

Staring at the enigmatic display, Tony chewed on the inside of his cheek and crunched the data of possibility. He could try to break the encoding, which would tell him what lay inside the mystery box — but when KITT found out, the already-annoyed A.I. would likely not respond well to having his memory hacked. He could call KITT up and demand to know just what the fuck was going on, but experience with the last three times KITT had gotten seriously pissed off suggested that blunt questions would be met with some variation of _Go to hell, if I wanted to talk to you right now we'd already be having a conversation_.  

Or, he could order in some food, chill out with some mindless TV, and wait for KITT to circle back around to the reasonable side of Planet Earth. Which might take a few hours, but… 

"JARVIS —" 

" _I've already placed the order, sir. Thai food, extra spicy?_ " 

"Got it in one," Tony said, and went to have a hot shower in the hopes of soothing the anxious (and yeah, pissed off too) jittering of every nerve in his all-too-human body. 


	2. Chapter 2

While lounging on the comfy leather couch in his penthouse rec room and chowing down on excellent _pla som wan_ , Tony had plenty of time to think — and think he did, because nothing JARVIS pulled up on the big screen TV was capable of holding his restless attention for more than five seconds at a stretch. The vast room felt empty and echoing in a way that Tony was pretty sure he wouldn't have noticed a few months ago: he was used to being alone, hell, he _liked_ being alone (JARVIS, being effectively an extension of himself, didn't count)… but lately he'd gotten accustomed to a constant extra presence, whether it was a wry disembodied voice or a graceful ebony humanoid form or a warm silken body lingering close enough to touch, a thin smile quirking its expressive lips as it leaned in to steal a bite of satay beef from his plate. _I've grown accustomed to her face_ , as a certain professor in an old musical had once lamented, and right now Tony was kicking himself for being stupid enough to let himself get used to being — 

— yeah, okay, he could admit it: to being loved, which was a situation that all his life experiences to date should have taught him was just a thin pretty veil over a pit full of rattlesnakes. And he was smacking himself upside the head double-time for deluding himself into thinking that a _machine_ —

Which was the point, on this profoundly frustrating afternoon, when the pity party train insisted on derailing itself, because Tony could lie to himself about a lot of things but he couldn't delude himself concerning the depths of feeling in question, on either side of the equation. 

He stuffed more food into his mouth and frowned as he chewed, staring at the figures flashing across the TV screen without seeing them. One of the many standing questions he had concerning KITT's functions was why, in the name of all that was holy and reasonable, the A.I.'s original programmers had elected to include an active emotional complex in the mix. KITT's affect wasn't a carefully crafted mask over fundamentally impassive programming modules: he actually _felt_ curiosity, and pleasure, and annoyance, and even rage on occasion, which made no sense if the programmers in question had been trying to build something behaviourally reliable… but all kinds of sense if they were trying to create an object that human beings would not only respond to, but actually warm to with every episode of exposure. And Tony, scowling as he slurped up the last of the fish course and turned his distracted attention to the beef, couldn't deny that the trick had worked: most people liked KITT upon first meeting him, and a few reacted to him with profound antipathy, but so far nobody had ever viewed him with complete indifference.  

 _Including me_ , because right now Tony was torn between the contradictory and equally powerful urges to (1) call KITT up and start yelling at the top of his lungs, and (2) call KITT up and try, as best he could with only a rusty screwdriver and a broken nail file in his own emotional comfort kit, to express how worried he was about KITT's current state of internal pain. In either case, the desire to (3) put on his armour and fly off in hot pursuit of the delinquent robot was in full operation, but he was pretty sure that if he tried that trick KITT would just run even further and faster. 

JARVIS, bless his prescient little silicon circuits, had silently pulled up a GPS map of KITT's position as soon as Tony had slumped onto the couch, and had kept it up ever since. It revealed that the car had crossed the George Washington Bridge and headed due west at maximum possible speed given current traffic flow, then turned south toward Newark and proceeded to cycle through various permutations of the tangled road and highway patterns — never slowing unless he had to, and never stopping if he could possibly help it. Studying the satellite view with its small black KITT-cursor tracing its restless track, Tony couldn't shake the cold tickle of intuition: _He's running, all right… but from what?_   

A flicker of inspiration struck, making Tony sit up sharply. "JARVIS," he mumbled around his second-to-last mouthful of satay, "what's the date-stamp on that encoded memory block?" 

" _August 25th 1985,_ " JARVIS responded at once, " _between 11:07:12 and 11:11:08 p.m. PST._ " 

"Scan all available historical archives — I want to know if there was a catastrophic event anywhere in North America on that date, at that time." 

A brief pause. No additional vidwindows popped into existence, which told Tony the result even before JARVIS spoke: " _I'm not finding anything that would qualify._ " 

"Could have been something the government hushed up," Tony mused, tapping his plate absently with his chopsticks, the last bite of beef forgotten. "Dig deeper. Use your backdoor to S.H.I.E.L.D. —" 

" _Sir?_ " 

He waved the chopsticks impatiently, deliberately not thinking about how much he was willing to risk on behalf of a strange and maddening computer program. "If they catch us, they catch us. Just do it." 

The pause was longer this time, but no more productive: " _I'm sorry, sir, but their records contain no mention of such an occurrence at that point in time._ " 

"Well fuck," Tony said conversationally, and demolished the last shred of his dinner. 

" _If I may make a suggestion…?_ " 

Tony chewed thoughtfully. Swallowed. Sighed, and tossed his empty plate onto the coffee table, and slumped back into the welcoming softness of expensive upholstery. "Sure, why not?" 

" _The time stamp in question marks the beginning of a larger encoded memory block which appears to include three days, two hours and forty-seven minutes of KITT's archive. Perhaps Doctor Barstow would be able to shed some light on the period of time in question?_ " 

Which made Tony blink, then grin like an idiot. "J, buddy of mine, you are a genius and a credit to your maker!" 

" _I'm only pointing out the obvious, sir,_ " JARVIS demurred, " _which you would certainly have spotted for yourself were you not running on a distinct deficit of sleep and —_ " 

He waved the subtle dig at his personal habits away. "Yeah, fifty-eighth verse, same as the first… call her up and let's see what she's got to say." Under his breath he muttered while JARVIS dialled: "It's about time KITT learned that he's not the only one who can go running to Mommy when the going gets tough…" 

[TO BE CONTINUED] 


End file.
